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Australia is in grave danger. The nuclear industry of the world has targeted our dry and ancient continent to become the repository of the world’s high level radioactive waste. And why not, when we continue to export the raw material for the world’s reactors - uranium.

Pangea, a Seattle based company which represents both British Nuclear Fuels and the American nuclear industry has been working with ANSTO, ERA, BHP, WMC and CRA to develop an “integrated spent fuel waste management industry in Australia”. Plans are to import 75,000 tons of intensely radioactive waste to bury in the desert in either South or Western Australia. ( the global total of irradiated fuel today is approximately 100,000 tones).

Irradiated fuel from nuclear power plants contains more than 95% of the radioactivity of the nuclear age - the global nuclear weapons complexes and other industries contribute less than 5% of the waste burden. Irradiated fuel 5 years out of a nuclear reactor is still one million times more radioactive than the original uranium fuel, and if unshielded, delivers a lethal dose of radiation in less than one minute.

Great dangers therefore lie with the transportation and handling of this material both for the workers and the public at large. It will have to be moved to the shipping terminals around the world in casks designed to withstand high speed accidents, sent on the high seas in ships which could deposit their load on the ocean floor, unloaded in the designated Australian port, transported by truck or rail to the desert, unloaded, and placed in the soil. Each step presents enormous risks of radiation exposure and accidents. In the US, a congressional bill to transport 1500 annual shipments of highly radioactive waste across the country to a mountain in Nevada over the next thirty years has been dubbed appropriately “the Mobile Chernobyl Bill”. Contained in this deadly waste are over one hundred radioactive elements which concentrate thousands of times in the food chain. These include strontium 90 which causes bone cancer and leukemia - radioactive for 600 years; cesium 137 which causes highly malignant muscle sarcomas - radioactive for 600 years and iodine 129 which induces thyroid cancer with a half life of 17 million years. Plutonium, so toxic that less than one millionth of a gram can cause cancer remains radioactive for 500,000 years.

We are dealing with geological and biological time frames that defy imagination. Although Australia’s geological situation has been relatively stable for eons, earthquakes occur not infrequently and the climate is changing rapidly with the advent of global warming. Because massive rains are predicted for Central Australia the futures market speculates that productive banana and pineapple plantations will develop in this arid land.

Stainless steel casks rust within several decades particularly if exposed to water, and the released radioactive elements will travel in underground waterways, aquifers and streams, there to pollute the drinking water for thousands of stations and their livestock. It is important to note that radioactive materials have no smell or taste and cannot be detected in food, that cancer has a long incubation time ranging from 5 to 60 years and that no individual cancer has a sign denoting its origin.

These deadly elements also cause deleterious genetic mutations in all biological systems inducing genetic diseases and deformities in plants and animals for the rest of time. The global nuclear industry is in crisis. Nuclear waste is piling up in the spent fuel pools beside the reactors, there is little room to store more and unless these radioactive fuel rods can be moved elsewhere, this problem spells the end of the nuclear power industry in many places. If Australia accepts the world’s nuclear waste we then sanction the production of ever more deadly materials, which, over time will induce epidemics of cancer, leukemia and genetic disease.

But accepting the waste would be a good thing for the Australian uranium industry, because demand for this material would then continue. Australia is therefore in a unique position. We can cut off the source of nuclear fuel by ending the production of uranium and we can ensure the closure of many of the world’s nuclear power plants by refusing to take their radioactive refuse.

Australia is under enormous pressure to accept this deadly legacy - as Fran Kelly implied to Peter Thompson on April 25th on ABC radio, the Parliament is presently swarming with Pangea lobbyists. This Federal Government is rabidly pronuclear. Indeed their energy policy several years ago contained a clause recommending the use of nuclear power for Australia before it was removed under pressure. Despite the protestations of the Prime Minister and his colleagues saying they will not be party to the Pangea deal, they are not to be trusted and we the people will have to take the law into our own hands. We need to be counted as the generation that refused to bequeath the world’s nuclear waste to our descendents.